i'm sure know this one, so this is no spoiler: a & b are actually the same! i'll be honest, that always did boggle my mind, but as soon as i squinted, i was able to see the greys as identical despite the checkerboard logic that my brain was imposing on them.
it turns out that color, while undeniably a scientific phenomenon all on its own, is basically meaningless and imperceptible (or at the very least, boring and nonspecific) without the context and relationships of other colors. in an attempt to avoid waxing altogether too philosophical, i'll cut the entire soliloquy down to the following: like everything else about our perception, once our puny infant-brains started to realize that, instead of taking in every detail of everything, they could just lump vast amounts of things together into big silly ideas, it became easier to understand that something was black or white than to actually look at the colors that are being shown to you, that all somehow, mysteriously, work together to become black or white. aka: we don't see blue, we have this platonic-ideal-transcendental-signified BLUE that lives in our heads that we apply to things that we know are "blue." but. that's not science. that's a mashup of ancient greek philosophy postmodern self loathing.
concerning the little colorplaying widgets, i found the overlapping/layering/transparency experiment the most interesting and informative so i thought i might try to lay out how it seems to work as best i can.
here's what i'm coming up with.
let's assume there's always a lighter and a darker "paper" in the overlap.
when the overlap is...
...the lightest shape, the lighter page appears to be on top, and transparent, but additive of light.
...in between, either page could be on top, and it seems to shift order as you look at it.
...the darkest shape, the darker page is on top, and it is subtractive of light.
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